As many of you know, we often joke that the SMF search function on the forum sucks, and seems to miss returning search results that we know are there.

Well, our own Wordzilla has been immersing himself in the SMF code, and has begun totally revamping the search code used by the forum.

He's just gotten started, but we need your help to:

test it and see if you can find any posts that should be returned during a search but aren't -- this is most important request -- try to find searches that are missing results that should have been found

make other suggestions on what you'd like to see improved (one thing already planned by wordzilla is to be able to sort results easily by date, author, relevancy).

I'm hoping that this first update will be able to address these 2 issues:

1. Missing results

2. Excessive noise/irrelevant info in results

The next update to forum search will (hopefully) feature a better relevance ranking system. We dont need having 10-pages of results - IMO just a dozen most relevant topics on topmost would suffice, for most people.

the new active board scoring heuristic is great.(note for testers, if you do the same exact search twice in a row you wont see the effect because of smf caching, so make sure if you test this you conduct a search for some other term in between tests).